


Obscure Word Drabble Collection

by piggy09



Series: Obscure Word Fics [17]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Helena has chickens named after archangels and that is all you need to know - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-18
Updated: 2015-11-27
Packaged: 2018-03-08 03:56:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 7,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3194405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Obscure word drabbles prompted on Tumblr, featuring:</p><p>Cosima | Sabaism: the worship of stars<br/>Lumberfamily | Eumoirous: happiness due to being honest and wholesome<br/>Propunk | Mimp: to speak in a prissy manner, usually with pursed lips<br/>Delphine | Dwale: to wander about deliriously<br/>Rachel | Brontide: the low rumbling of distant thunder<br/>Cophine | Eumoirous: happiness due to being honest and wholesome<br/>Lumberpunk | Sabaism: the worship of stars<br/>Rudy & Helena | Wanweird: an unhappy fate<br/>Helena & Sarah | Dwale: to wander about deliriously<br/>Beth | Pluvophile: lover of rain<br/>Helena & Kira | Paralian: someone who lives by the sea<br/>Rachel & Ethan | Anagapesis: no longer loving someone as much as you once did<br/>Propunk | Autolatry: self-worship<br/>Rachel | Accipitral: hawklike<br/>Beth | Azuline: blue<br/>Felix & Krystal | Capernoited: slightly intoxicated or tipsy<br/>French Leather | Nyctophile: a person who loves night/darkness<br/>Helena & Sarah | Paralian: a person who lives near the sea<br/></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Cosima | Sabaism

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave kudos/comments if you enjoy! Thank you for reading.

Delphine freckles like crazy in the summer, all along her arms and legs and the skin of her back, somehow; dusted across her shoulders Cosima thinks the freckles look like pollen, maybe, or dirt (not that that’s a bad thing – she can’t quite put it into words, not really, how dirt is soil and soil makes flowers grow). On Delphine’s back the freckles look like stars.

At night they lie intertwined together and Cosima traces lines between the freckles on Delphine’s back, makes up silly stories that are one part born from summers at camp and are one part born from long, lonely nights in the library with nothing to do but research astronomy and are one part born from her love of Delphine.

Delphine, Delphine, Delphine; Cosima can feel how much she loves this woman spilling from the back of her throat. She has to hurry to shape it with her tongue and teeth into coherency – into something besides Delphine’s name murmured over and over into the skin of her shoulders, the skin of her back. _Delphine_. At night the only sounds are the two of them breathing and Cosima’s voice telling half-formed stories, beautiful in their fragility, woven together from swan’s feathers and drops of dew. Once upon a time there was a hero. Once upon a time there were two people in love. Once upon a time there was someone who loved someone else so much they wove the stars together into the shape of them, can you believe it?

Yes, Delphine says, I can believe it. At some point she’s rolled over and turned to look at Cosima; Cosima can see entire galaxies blooming in her pupils, pinpoints of light in the dark.

Cosima leans forward and kisses her. Their mouths fit together perfectly.


	2. Lumberfamily | Eumoirous

In the mornings Cal makes Kira breakfast and packs her lunch, his hands easy on the griddle and the Ziploc baggies, making pancakes into Mickey Mouse heads if Kira asks him to. That was Sarah’s job – emphasis on _was_ – but now she gets Kira dressed instead.

When Cal helped Kira get dressed she’d come clomping down the stairs in rain boots and a tutu, because Cal’s miserable at saying no to his daughter. Cal doesn’t burn water the way Sarah does, and when Sarah helps Kira get dressed she looks pretty as a picture. Cal tells her so, kissing Sarah’s cheek and saying well now, don’t the two of you look nice.

At breakfast they tease each other about the tutu, Sarah’s disastrous attempt at making pasta, but they don’t really mean it. Sarah shoves French toast into her mouth and makes exaggerated faces at Kira, who sticks her tongue out the way Auntie Helena taught her. Cal complains about table manners but doesn’t mean that either, not when his girls are happy.

And they are happy. Happiness comes slowly, like the blue of twilight breaking over the hills, but it does come.

Cal misses the hills, sometimes, misses his cabin. Misses his chickens. Helena sends them pictures of them all the time, though, and gets horribly offended when Cal mistakes Sariel for Uriel.

Kira can always tell them all apart.

Besides, it’s worth it: worth it for Kira to come running home after school, clutching a piece of paper with macaroni glued to it like it’s the Mona Lisa. The way Sarah fusses over it, hangs it up on their fridge, it may as well be. Cal pretends it isn’t just to watch the identical expressions of disbelief rise onto Sarah and Kira’s faces. Two of a kind, those two.

It’s worth it for the way Sarah’s face lights up when she sees her sisters, when Cosima comes over to help Kira with her science lessons – and sometimes Delphine comes, too, standing solid next to Cal to watch their girls, watch their girls watch Kira – and when the three of them get together in the apartment, shoving Cal out with a laugh and a promise to keep him posted on whatever Helena says via Skype.

It’s worth it for Sarah asleep next to him at night, the way she curls into him like she was meant to be there – and she was, Cal thinks, lying there in the dark with her chest rising and falling against his, the sound of her heartbeat like a miracle.

They’re a family now, aren’t they? Cal would give up his cabin a million times over just for one of Kira’s smiles. For a lifetime of them – well. It feels like being whole.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YES I still care more about Helena hanging out with the chickens than I care about the rest of this fic.


	3. Propunk | Mimp

“Stop,” snaps Rachel from the kitchen, where she pauses and then adds more to her glass of wine; she’ll need it.

“Stop,” Sarah whines back in an absolutely _abysmal_ imitation of Rachel’s own voice. She’s sprawled on the couch like she’s melting, looking at Rachel upside-down over the back of the couch, her hair tumbling in a low waterfall down her back. Rachel feels an idiotic urge to say _seriously_ , like a child on the playground being bullied.

Other childhood tactic: the silent treatment. God, are they six years old? Rachel rolls her eyes to the heavens and takes a sip from her drink.

“What, too much for you?” Sarah says, and Rachel doesn’t know what she looks like because Rachel isn’t looking at her. “The great and terrible Rachel Duncan, can’t even handle her own bloody voice.”

“It’s not my voice,” Rachel says, feeling stupider and stupider and – damn, she’s risen to the bait.

“Really,” says Sarah, then pauses. “ _Really_ ,” she says snidely, and if Rachel sounds like that she is getting surgery on her vocal cords immediately. “Fooled your doorman well enough, didn’t I.”

Neither of them point out that Rachel fooled Sarah’s entire family; Rachel thinks that might be a sore spot, but honestly she doesn’t have the slightest idea. Sarah’s unpredictable in what makes her lash out.

“That’s hardly an achievement for the record,” she says instead, accepting surrender gracefully – by that she means picking up her glass and moving to sit in the chair across from Sarah.

“My name is Rachel _Duncan_ ,” Sarah says nasally, “and I can’t even handle the slightest bit of criticism.”

“Better,” Rachel says, eyebrows raised. “Congratulations. Maybe if you keep practicing we’ll be able to take you out into polite society.”

Sarah’s brief look of horror at the thought makes Rachel huff a short sharp breath through her nose, before she can stop herself; then Sarah thumps her head against the couch and begins chuckling, low and slightly hysterical. Rachel thinks she agrees with the sentiment: this entire situation is the most ridiculous thing she has ever, ever seen.


	4. Delphine | Dwale

On the plane to Frankfurt Delphine dreams instead that she is walking into Felix’s apartment; she dreams Cosima there, asleep in the bed.

She dreams Cosima there, dying in the bed.

In her dream she does not fumble for words the way she does when she is awake; instead her palm fits perfectly against Cosima’s face and her hand, her words, they are like a healing. All she feels is love and certainty.

Then she wakes up, drool all the way down her face, eyes dry, forehead creased from where it was smashed against the plane window. She looks at her reflection in the glass – she is sallow and miserable and not at all the sort of person who would go back to Cosima. She sees herself, in that moment, how Rachel Duncan sees her: weak.

When she gets to Frankfurt, the luxurious apartment she’s been offered, she looks at herself in the mirror and breathes one, two breaths.

Then she raises the scissors.

She cuts her hair short, dyes it brown; it won’t be enough, not by a long shot, but it will buy her time and that’s what counts. She shoves clothes into a bag and flies out the door: like a bird, she flies towards true north. Cosima. Cosima. Cosima.

The way there is jagged, like a row of sharp teeth in a predator’s mouth, like the row of sharp teeth she feels snapping at her heels. She moves in jagged lines like constellations, Frankfurt to Berlin, where she fumbles with her hairpins but breaks into Katja Obinger’s apartment; Berlin to Gouda, Gouda to London, backtrack to Vienna, keep going, keep going. At times it seems like she’s wandering about aimlessly, but she isn’t, can’t. She can’t eat or sleep without feeling like it’s a waste of time, like she should be moving, and her dreams are the silver flash of nose rings and the slowing peaks and valleys of a heart monitor and the brush of lips against her own.

She wonders if Cosima is being punished for Delphine’s disobedience, back home.

(And it is home. It _is_ home. Nothing is more home than Cosima.)

She wonders if Cosima is alive.

_Soon_ , she says to Cosima in her dreams, _soon, don’t worry, I’m coming_. She is delirious and sleepless and maybe farther away than when she started – but she’s coming. She’s coming home.


	5. Rachel | Brontide

Where does it start? Ask her later and she’ll consider the very second – captured eternally on train-platform security cameras – that Sarah Manning grabbed Elizabeth Childs’ purse and ran. But honestly, who knows; where is that one fragile moment that ruined everything? Was it the first rasp of a cough in Jennifer’s throat? Was it the moment Helena’s hand first wrapped around a knife?

Maybe the experiment was ruined from the very start, the second Helena and Sarah split in two inside the womb. Maybe that was the moment that Rachel was ruined.

She can’t stop thinking about it, combing over past mistakes over and over like they will align into a constellation – as if they will become fathomable and, once fathomable, preventable. 

They aren’t. Rachel sits at her desk and scrabbles through lists of past mistakes, watching the new ones pile into her inbox: Cosima has kissed Delphine (mistake: assigning Doctor Cormier to Cosima) (mistake: letting Aldous have a hand in the monitor selection process) (mistake: not eliminating Aldous years ago), Helena has effectively rendered Olivier useless (mistake: assigning Paul Dierden to Elizabeth Childs) (mistake: not increasing security in Club Neolution’s basement) (mistake: humoring Olivier’s…enhancement in the first place), Sarah Manning has stepped into the game.

Mistake: Sarah Manning. Because Sarah Manning is a mistake, a freak accident, a glitch in their overall machine; Rachel knows this is true, because the longer Sarah stays in town the more tangled the web grows. Mistake after mistake after mistake, messes for Rachel to clean up – and they’re only growing bigger, bodies spawning bodies, blood wanting blood.

They are building towards something, Rachel knows; there’s a howling in her ears, tinny, and her hands are beginning to shake. 

She can hear a rumbling in the distance. It sounds like something waking up. It sounds like the engine of an oncoming train.

It sounds, a little bit, like the roar of distant thunder.


	6. Cophine | Eumoirous

Most nights, Cosima dreams of Delphine. It doesn’t matter where she is: asleep in an uncomfortable tangle on Felix’s couch, crashing in the lab that is nowhere as good as the one at DYAD, curled up in Shay’s sweet-smelling bed with Shay’s limbs twined with her own. She closes her eyes and Delphine is there.

Sometimes Delphine lies to her again –  _I will never leave you, I love you, I am right here, there is no need to cry_. Sometimes she just stays silent. It doesn’t really matter. What matters: Cosima feels wholeness like sickness in her lungs when Delphine is there. The world is brighter, in her dreams, and it feels like each blurred second is golden and forever.

When she wakes, it’s dim. The world. So she usually goes back to sleep. If anyone’s concerned about how much she’s sleeping, they don’t show it – she’s sure they’re muttering behind her back, all of them, but she’s too tired to confront them and not tired enough.

She goes back to sleep. Delphine is waiting for her – hair short, hair long, hair straight, hair falling in golden curls. Delphine is waiting for her, bleeding in a snow-covered field. Delphine is waiting for her, holding a bottle of wine in one hand and reaching for Cosima with the other. Delphine is waiting for her, wearing a smile and nothing else at all.

 _You aren’t real,_ Cosima says one night, words not stuck together, words not bleeding at all.  _I’m going to wake up, and you’ll be gone_.

 _What do you want me to say?_ Delphine asks.

 _I don’t know,_ Cosima says.  _Lie?_


	7. Lumberpunk | Sabaism

“So,” Sarah says, voice muffled through layers and layers of clothing, “this your idea of a good time? Trudgin’ around in the snow for a few hours?”

“I’ve always wanted to date a marshmallow,” Cal says back, but the truth is he isn’t feeling the cold: he’s felt warm ever since he saw Sarah again, when she unclasped her mittened hand from Kira’s to kiss him on the lips sweet and cold. Right now her hand is holding his – probably, it’s hard to tell through the layers – and so he mostly feels warm. Wishes there were people around (even though that kind of ruins the point of hiding in Iceland) so he could drag Sarah over there, say,  _hey, this is my girlfriend, or – or something_. Just for the joy of seeing her laugh.

But this is almost better, because it’s just the two of them, him and Sarah. Well. Him and an increasingly unamused Sarah, watching him with eyebrows raised behind her snow goggles, waiting for him to reveal the reason why he pulled the two of them away from the rest of her family in the middle of the night.

Cal makes a show of looking around them at the featureless snow, empty for miles and miles but for the twinkling lights of – of home in the distance, before saying, “Yep, that’s the spot.”

“Really,” says Sarah, a laugh audible in the creases of her voice.

“Yep.”

“Right  _here_.”

“Absolutely.”

“You sure?”

“I am.”

“ _Cal_ ,” Sarah says, exasperated but fond, but before she can say more Cal uses their joined hands to pull her down to the ground. She lands with an  _oof_  on top of him, padded body snug against his chest. 

“If you wanted a shag I could think of better ways,” Sarah mutters, and Cal just snorts.

“Get off,” he says, “you’re crushing me, Sarah Manning.” 

Sarah obligingly rolls off, onto her back in the snow, and–

“Oh,” she says, and for a moment there’s something childlike in her voice, some combination of surprise and wonder that makes Cal’s chest ache.

“Yeah,” he says, and for a moment they’re just quiet.

You can see the stars so clearly here – he and Kira trudged out a few nights ago, picked out constellations, made up their own before they went back inside and made hot chocolate. There’s a part of him that thinks that maybe if he does the same thing with Sarah it will trick time and space, keep them all here as a family forever, stop those past hurts that he can see ghosts of – things that happened between the time Cal and Kira left and the time that is now, things Cal couldn’t protect her from. 

But that’s not really a thing he can wish for, and so he enjoys this instead: lying in the snow next to a girl he thinks he loves, watching the way the stars glitter like diamond dust overhead. 

“They’re beautiful,” Sarah says, quietly. And she reaches across the space between them and wraps her hand around his.


	8. Rudy & Helena | Wanweird

_Look_ , says Rudy,  _I don’t want to be here either_.

“Then go,” Helena says loudly to the dark of Alison Hendrix’s spare bedroom, “or I will eat you like a scorpion.”

… _I don’t know what that means_ , Rudy says. He has been here for the whole night: as soon as Helena left the Bubbles, belly full, sugar in the creases of her lips, he was outside waiting for her. She is fairly certain he is a ghost, or a dream. Real men do not usually stand there when Helena punches them. Her fist does not go all the way through real men’s faces, and into the wall on the other side. 

All night he has been there. It is an unhappy fate for the both of them, because neither of them want him there.

Helena rolls over in the dark and presses her hands over her ears, says, “Go  _away_ , Rudy scar-face.” 

 _I_ can’t _!_  Rudy bellows, trying to knock the lamp off of the bedside table, growling when his fist goes right through.  _I want to see my brother again, you bitch, I want to see_ all _my brothers. If I was haunting someone–_

He stops, abruptly. 

 _I want my ma_ , he says, soft.

“My mother is dead,” Helena says, rolling over onto her back, “and so are you. You are dreaming that you are awake, scar-faced boy, but it is time to go back to sleep.”

The bed doesn’t dip when he sits down on it, but she knows he’s there anyways. She stays where she is, listens to the non-sound of him shuffling around the bed and curling up to face her. His lip isn’t bleeding anymore. Besides that, it is almost the same as when he died.

 _Hey, Helena_ , Rudy whispers, smiling sadly – like he’s telling a joke, but the punchline makes him too sad to think about.  _Do you know any lullabies?_


	9. Helena & Sarah | Dwale

Sarah walks outside the cantina into the crisp burn of the desert sun and finds Helena sitting thoughtfully on the porch; her elbows are resting on her knees, limbs dangling, and she looks faintly ape-like in a way Sarah can’t articulate.

“Nice bruise,” Sarah says, throwing herself down next to Helena. “S’s got a hell of a right hook, yeah?”

“Yes, her fist was from hell,” Helena says thoughtfully. “It hurts very much.”

“I would like to be  _drunk_ ,” she says, flopping inelegantly onto ground, a sprawl of arms and legs. 

“Yeah, but you’re a mom now,” Sarah says. Helena sighs, yanks her cowboy hat over her face violently. Sarah can hear the faint sounds of a raspberry coming from behind the straw brim.

“Thought you were out walkin’ it off, anyways,” she continues to the spit-filled silence.

Helena swings back up like a demented jack-in-the-box, plops her hat proudly back on her head. “I wandered,” she says, “and won in many games, to get food. Men spit at me, and so I spit back. It was _wonderful_.”

Abruptly she frowns, fidgets for a moment. Her mouth opens and shuts, opens and shuts. Finally she lifts her eyes to look at Sarah.

“Mis-sus S is a good grandmother to Kira,” she says, “Yes?”

“Yeah,” Sarah says, voice rusting. “Yeah.”

Helena’s mouth twists. “But she made you leave Kira behind.”

“No,” Sarah says, “no, that was my fault. Siobhan – she did what she thought was right, yeah? For Kira.”

“For Kira,” Helena murmurs back.  _And also with you_. “But you are her mother. You know what is best for her.” Her fingers trail along the stomach of her borrowed button-down, clench and knot in the fabric.

“Not always,” Sarah says. She turns and looks into the street, watches the way the passers-by stir the dust. “Bein’ a mother doesn’t mean you just – know what to do. Wish it did.”

“I know this,” Helena says. “I have seen many bad mothers.”

For a second Amelia sits between them, her ghost heavy and sad. Sarah sighs, and their mother leaves.

“You’ll be a good mom, Helena,” she says, not turning to look, not wanting to see whatever hope might be churning in Helena’s eyes. “You’re gonna fight for your kid, yeah? Someone’s gotta.”

A pause.

“I am very tired of fighting,” Helena says softly. “I tried to fight S. But then we hugged, and I liked that better.” 

Sarah almost jumps at the unexpected weight of Helena’s head on her shoulders. Her cowboy hat is digging into Sarah’s chin, all straw and bristles. Sarah shoves it off and Helena makes an irritated sound, butts her head into Sarah’s throat. For a moment they scuffle, but then Sarah slings her arm around Helena’s shoulder and they just sit. Just for a minute.

“Well, maybe you can try something new,” Sarah says. 

“I would like that,” Helena says, “very much.”

They sit like that for a minute, bruised and battered and so very tired, and then they stand up, brush the dust off, and go back inside.


	10. Beth | Pluvophile

i.

Beth is eight years old when her mother dies. The funeral is sunny and hot and Beth’s legs are itching – because her tights are uncomfortable, but also because she needs to run. She needs to run away from the empty grave where what was her mother is lying, not breathing; she needs to run away from the sound of her father’s distant empty sobs and how they make a drum out of her chest to echo in it. 

So the second the funeral ends she does: run. She runs all the way to a corner of the cemetery where no one goes, the gravestones all worn away so you can’t even tell who’s there. She curls up behind a worn gravestone and cries and cries and cries.

When the rain comes, it’s a relief. Beth tips her face up towards the sky and lets the rain smooth tears from her face, tells herself it’s her mother reaching out for her one last time.

ii.

On her third date with Paul, it starts raining – on the walk back from the restaurant, there’s a crack of thunder and rain pours down in buckets. It’s the kind of rain Beth’s old track coach would call  _cats and dogs_ ; Beth sheds her coat easily and stands in the middle of it, face tipped up towards the sky, letting it soak into her thin short dress and make a mess out of her updo. It’s the realest thing she’s felt all night.

“Hey, you’re getting soaked,” Paul says, “come on, Beth, we gotta get inside.”

But Beth’s peeling off her heels and jumping into the nearest forming puddle, laughter bubbling up from her chest as dirty water splashes up her legs. 

“Don’t be such a wuss,” she calls, laughing, “it’s just a little water, Paul.”

She pretends to ignore the way he’s frowning at her behind her back – less a concerned boyfriend, more a minder – and splashes in every puddle she finds, her laughter trailing behind her as she goes.

iii.

She’s driving back from Minnesota and her hands are shaking on the wheel. They are. She wishes they weren’t, but they are. Cosima had so easily agreed to switch majors, like she didn’t know – and she doesn’t know, doesn’t know the danger any of them are in. Clone assassin breathing down their necks and monitors and the rasp of a cough starting to tickle the back of Beth’s throat and–

…and it’s raining outside, the drum of it on Beth’s car windows. Part of her mind is pulled involuntarily to rainy days in elementary school, packed lunches and scuffling with all of her friends; part of her thinks of the academy, the warm burn of her muscles running laps and the comforting chill of water on her skin. But part of her is screaming, a long shrill wail, because the pressure of all that water on the car is making her claustrophobic. 

It feels too much like drowning.

She wants to get out of the car and run, run for miles and miles until – she doesn’t know. Doesn’t know where she’d run to. Doesn’t know, anymore, where she has to go.

Beth fumbles for the radio and turns it up too high, puts the windshield wipers on, and clenches her hands until her knuckles are white and you can’t see the tremors anymore.

She drives like that, all the way home.

iv.

It isn’t raining the day she dies.

She doesn’t know whether or not to be relieved.


	11. Helena & Kira | Paralian

Kira goes to visit all the time – sometimes her mom comes, and she and Aunt Helena go and talk while Kira and Mags go down to the beach, but a lot of times Kira comes on her own: drives all the way down to the sea, humming along to the radio and letting the sea breeze blow through her hair.

Helena’s hair is brown, now, all the way down to the tips; there’s a little bit of grey in the roots that Kira teases her about every now and then while she’s eating slices of babka at Helena’s worn wood kitchen table. Helena just laughs, says something about not wanting to dye her hair anymore, sticks her tongue out at her daughter and says it is Mags’ fault.  _Vy dayete meni syvoho volossya_. 

She’s happy, there. Kira remembers the first time the two of them met; she can still feel it, the sadness that poured from Helena in waves and was strong enough to send Kira outside with her just so Helena would have someone to hold her hand. But she remembers the look of bright, surprised joy on Helena’s face when she held her daughter for the first time; she remembers all of them building this house together, Helena shrieking with laughter when she got a dab of paint on Felix’s nose, little Mags toddling around everyone’s feet and peeping away in a mixture of Ukrainian and English. They are happier now than they were, all of them. That is the gift they have all been given: the chance for Helena and Kira to walk side-by-side in that space between water and sand, and pick up seashells for Aunt Cosima. Time for Kira’s aunt to remember how to bake, to carve kitchen tables from driftwood, to let her hair grow out. Time and space and something that is a little bit like peace.

Helena smiles at Kira from across the table, soft and fond. Outside the kitchen window the sea goes on the way it always has: in and out and in again, steady and calm like breaths.


	12. Rachel & Ethan | Anagapesis

Rachel thinks she liked her father better as an idea.

Looking at him, she notes with veiled disgust that his suit is wrinkled; he looks unwashed, unkempt. She wonders how she ever could have loved him.

In Rachel’s memory Ethan Duncan has been softened – memory is kind to him, kind to her father, smoothing the wrinkles from his face and helpfully discarding any piece that does not fit in the picture she has built, the memorial wall of sorts.

She allowed herself this small indulgence. Why not, after all. It’s not as if it could come back to bite her.

Except now it has – well. Not bitten her. More like gummed, toothlessly, at her perfectly-manicured fingers. Come to beg for scraps, her father.

No, no, she vastly prefers the version of him she has made in her head.  _Daddy_.  _Father_ , as she grew older, learned the power that words can have, leaving out the soft words, the ones with no bite of consonants.  _Daddy_ is too soft. It ends on a soft and open note, like pleading. Your mouth gapes open.

_Father_  ends with an  _r_ , for  _Rachel_ , for  _remember_ , possibly for  _regret_. Leaves a lot of things open,  _r_ , even as your mouth closes.


	13. Propunk | Autolatry

When Rachel kisses Sarah there is something so hungry in it – like she has been waiting for this and only this, spending her whole life starving. Her fingers tangled in Sarah’s hair, her tongue carving itself along the edges of Sarah’s teeth, it’s all questions:  _did you lose your teeth the same time I did, does your hair feel the same way mine would, are we the same, are you the same as me_. Sarah doesn’t know why she kisses back, sometimes; certainly in her there is no question, no desperate need to find the parts of Rachel that run parallel to her own. Maybe it’s just easy to reflect Rachel’s need, be exactly what Rachel needs her to be: a mirror, and one that is just as hungry for a glimpse at a reflection.

Sometimes Rachel will stop and just  _stare_  at Sarah, one eye lagging ever-so-slightly behind the other; her mouth droops open, her eyes flit from bruise to bruise, tracing patterns of blood.  _What_ , Sarah wants to ask,  _do you do this to yourself too?_  After Sarah hit Rachel in the face with that pistol, did she stare at her bruise in the mirror? Did she bite her own lip to watch the blood drip? Does she hate herself, or does she only hate the parts of herself that Sarah has too?

But Sarah doesn’t do this to think, doesn’t put her hands on Rachel’s skin to wonder how it is and isn’t different from her own, to think:  _why_. So when Rachel stares at her Sarah just laughs, or spits, or closes the distance between them and smashes her lips against Rachel’s own in a way that is less romance and more  _violence_.

One of them is bleeding again – but then again, one of them is always bleeding. Does it really matter who?


	14. Rachel | Accipitral

The DYAD cleans out the house Ethan Duncan was hiding in – the one he slept in like an animal, rolling in his own filth. Rachel demands to be taken to it anyways, after one father is revived and another dies. That is: somewhere Aldous Leekie is getting into a car, or is not getting into a car, and here Rachel is getting out of her car and walking into the house where her father spent years not dead.

Her footsteps echo off the wooden floorboards, dull clicks. The entire place is covered with smears of dust. There’s a systematic tally of the contents of the house sitting in a spreadsheet on Rachel’s laptop. Twenty boxes of newspapers, with dates spread sporadically over the last twenty years. Four teapots. One pair of bright blue headphones. Cages and cages of birds.

They’d offered to give the birds to Rachel, actually. Here is a weakness: for a moment she considered taking them. She imagined the years her father spent cooing at them, letting them eat from his fingertips – she wonders if he gave them names that sounded almost, but not quite like  _Rachel_. Rosalind, maybe. 

She imagined holding out her own fingers to them, letting them hop on. Their bright eyes, bright feathers.

She imagined snapping their necks. 

It would be quick, like a hawk-strike. Death is at times a mercy – and more importantly, there is something satisfying about taking the products of such tender love and care and ripping them to pieces.

But no, she let them be disposed of. One wave of her fingers and off they went, to some low-level lab assistant or off to be murdered by someone else’s talons. She doesn’t care. Birds aren’t the sort of animals she’d want to remake in her own image.

Bird excrement has dried, in places, on the ground. Rats also, if Rachel’s old biology lessons serve. She wants to slap him. (She wants to slap him because he  _left her_ , and he spent years rotting in a house when he should have been  _with her_ , and he didn’t name his birds after her, and part of her wants to know if he read them  _The Island of Doctor Moreau_  and part of her wants him to read it to her again and she hates that part viciously and with a sharpness.) She wants to slap him because he was a  _god_ , and he let himself live here. Surrounded by dead rats and birds in cages. Prey animals. She hates him so desperately. She  _hates_  him.

But she doesn’t do anything about it. There’s nothing to do; even if she let herself be the sort of animal that breaks, there is nothing here to break. Only the house itself, which will be cleaned and – quietly – sold. Soon this version of her father will die, only living on in the labyrinth of his own brain and in the brain of Sarah Manning.

Rachel sits at the kitchen table. From some sort of instinct she toes her shoes off, folds her legs underneath her, rests her hands on the chair and leans on them. Her toes curl in the dust, on the floor. Unhygienic and disgusting. She doesn’t move. Wonders if Sarah sat in this chair. God help her, she wants to know. She wants to know what Sarah said about her, and what she’s become. She isn’t the sort of caged bird her father could love anymore, she thinks. There is too much of a hawk in her. It’s good news she doesn’t want him to love her, then, probably. It’s good news that she only wants whatever secrets he has locked inside his brain. Lucky, that the rest of it can be discarded.

The silence hangs heavy on the house, and Rachel sits there – smaller than she’s known how to be, not for a long time – and tries not to think about the car that’s idling outside. She imagines, instead, the way that birdsong would fill this house. Allows herself one moment of hopeful stupidity, stupid hope. She fills her mind with birds.

Then, one by one, she snaps their necks.


	15. Beth | Azuline

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [warning: dissociation]

On her way back from meeting Sammy Beth loses time, and wakes up knee-deep in the ocean. She doesn’t know where she is; she’s guessing from the bone-deep bite of salt that it’s the Atlantic and not the more forgiving Pacific. It’s so cold. At some point she rolled up her pants, but not far enough; they’re soaked. She stands there for a minute or two, tells herself that it is a bad thing that she can’t feel her bones.

Eventually she wades out again, scraping her feet against unseen rocks in the sand as she goes. Ribbons of blood seep from the soles of her feet into the water, vanish. A headache is pounding away all around her skull, like a crown above her eyes. Queen Elizabeth of the hollow kingdom. Queen Elizabeth, reigning with her pill-bottle scepter stuck together with sleepless nights and hope. Send her to the guillotine. Let them drink whiskey, let them eat nothing, let them drink more whiskey. She sits down in the sand.

She doesn’t know what day it is. She left Cincinnati mid-evening but the sky was clouded-over, grey like padded wool or grey like the haze she sinks in when she downs two of the grey pills and one of the white ones and chases it with a shot. Now the sky is blue, bright and sharp as a bullet. Beth hugs her legs to her chest, rests her forehead on her folded knees. The sound of the sea sighing in and out is more than she can stand.

“Think, Childs,” she mutters to herself, voice sounding like the cold dregs in the bottom of a coffee cup. She says it again, because her own voice – cold and tired as it is – covers up the sound of all that blue. “What day is it? Come on, you’re a detective, figure it out.”

Say it’s the Atlantic. Ten hour drive from Cincinnati to the ragged cliff’s-edge of the continent, assuming she didn’t stop to – what, sleep? Dream? It’s afternoon now. There’s no way she lost more than twenty hours. She hopes. She wishes she knew where her shoes were, or her car, or the last bit of her sanity. 

That last thought sends her laughing, rusty and eroded by salt. Beth collapses onto her back, lies there and laughs without stopping. Above her seagulls are wheeling. She thinks of vultures, wonders. Would she have kept wading, if she hadn’t woken up? Would she have drowned?

Abruptly it isn’t funny anymore. Beth lies there, miles and miles from anything she might’ve once called home. Inches away from her feet, the sea is breathing. She wishes it wasn’t.


	16. Felix & Krystal | Capernoited

“We should probably kiss,” says Krystal, like it’s an idea that’s just come to her. She’s draped across Felix’s couch like a pink scarf, heels dangling off her toes, plastic cup of something a violent blue color dangling in her hand and sloshing dangerously. (She brings her own drinks. They don’t share them.)

“I’m sorry,” Felix says, “ _what_.”

“I mean, you can feel it, right,” Krystal says, turning her head drowsily to look at him, eyes wide. Somehow her mascara hasn’t clumped together. It’s some sort of miracle. “We have, like, this  _energy_. I feel like the vibes we’re giving off are sort of undeniable, you know? We should just” (she sighs dramatically) “get it out of the way, so it doesn’t completely ruin our relationship.”

“Krystal, darling,” Felix says slowly – he’s starting to realize he is far,  _far_  too sober for this – “I’m  _gay_.” 

“Oh,” says Krystal, visibly deflating. “Oh, I – yeah, of course, you’re  _so_ gay, I don’t know why I didn’t – see that earlier, my gaydar must be so totally  _busted_.” She takes a sip of the blue thing moodily. She looks heartbroken. Felix has seen many variations of that same heartbroken face. It’s unfair that it still works on him.

“ _Fine_ ,” he says. “ _One_ kiss, and you are absolutely not allowed to tell anyone about it.”

The heartbroken expression flips off like a switch and Krystal sits up violently fast – she blinks rapidly for a moment, as she readjusts for gravity, and then beams like a puppy presented with a slipper to chew on.

“Also,” Felix says, pointing at her, “this does not make me straight, you understand? My sexuality is not fluid.”

“No, yeah, of course,” Krystal says, inching closer to him. “I was in my high school GSA, you know? I’m a total ally.”

“Alright, please never say that again,” Felix says. Krystal nods very seriously. They eye each other’s lips for a moment, with mixed skepticism (Felix) and tentative delight (all Krystal), and then their lips are kind of…smashed inelegantly together. It would be a good kiss, if it was the sort of thing Felix was into. Krystal is trying very, very hard. Her mouth tastes like the color blue, and what is probably strawberry-flavored lip gloss. He wouldn’t put it past her. 

They stop fairly quickly; Krystal settles back on her haunches and frowns, tipsy mind struggling to compute.

“Well!” she chirps. “We don’t need to ever do that again.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Felix says. And they do.


	17. French Leather | Nyctophile

The apartment the DYAD has provided her is exactly what you would expect – sterile, clean to the point of antiseptic. Every time she comes back she forgets, for a moment, that she is not in a lab; she expects to turn around and see Cosima, or Cosima’s body. It’s the sort of light that glares.

So: to see Sarah Manning, lounging on Delphine’s couch as if it is anything resembling comfortable, is jarring. She’s dressed in black leather. She looks like a patch of night-darkness in the middle of all that light. 

“The door was locked,” Delphine says, calmly. She drops her bag, watches Sarah out of the corner of her eye while she goes to get herself a drink. Despite herself she still seeks out pieces of all of them, in Sarah’s face – she thinks she can see some of Rachel’s cruelty, around Sarah’s eyes. Cosima’s cruelty too. It breeds like lilacs in the corners of her mouth. 

“Was it,” Sarah says back. She stands up, walks over to the kitchen. She’s so out of place here that she looks natural, like the world is rewriting itself to put her at the center of it. Delphine pours herself a bourbon. Then she pours a second, and slides it over. It is something like a challenge.

Sarah takes the glass, raises it in a mocking toast, downs it. Delphine watches the line of her throat as she swallows. It is, perhaps, a terrible habit. 

“Why are you here,” Delphine says. She strives for Marion’s cold; she can’t quite reach it.

Sarah pushes the now-empty glass around and around. She stays silent. Delphine wants–

Instead she pushes her own glass over. Sarah downs that one too.

“You can tell me,” she says. There’s a stutter around that  _t-_  that wants to turn into  _trust_ ,  _you can trust me_ , but she manages to swallow that down like the bourbon she hasn’t had. She thinks Sarah can hear it anyways; her eyes flick up to meet Delphine’s, wry, disbelieving.  _Well said_ , maybe, or  _you’re the real danger, Delphine_. 

“Yeah?” Sarah says. “I can tell you, Delphine?” The words could be a vulnerability. Instead they are mocking.

“I promised Cosima I would protect you,” she says, feeling earnestness trickle back into her words despite herself. 

“So did I,” Sarah says. It’s sharp. She abandons the glass, takes one step closer to Delphine. Another one. She’s smaller than Delphine, and yet Delphine feels trapped; pushed here against the counter in an apartment that isn’t hers, a life that isn’t hers, a body that isn’t hers any longer. A woman staring at her, eyes hooded and glaring, who was never hers at all. Sarah is so close. She smells the way night smells – cold and sharp and utterly unknown.

“Do you feel safe, Delphine?” Sarah breathes, too close to Delphine’s lips, too close to the heartbeat hammering away in her throat.

Delphine could answer that, or she could kiss her. She chooses the latter. She kisses her – a desperate  _yes_ , a furious  _no_. The world tastes like bourbon. Delphine’s always preferred wine. She can’t stop herself from kissing Sarah, even though it is a betrayal – a surrender – something Delphine can’t allow herself. Sarah’s hands have tangled themselves in Delphine’s hair and Delphine’s hands have gotten under Sarah’s tank at some point; she doesn’t know when, only knows that when she scratches her nails lightly down the fever-warmth of Sarah’s skin Sarah makes a low sound into Delphine’s mouth that makes Delphine want to – want to – want – 

One or both of them breaks the kiss and they’re heaving for breath, Delphine more so than the woman who is not hers. Sarah’s tongue pokes at her own canine, considering. Delphine could kiss her again. Delphine could start crying. She could say  _tell Cosima I’m sorry_. She could do any number of things. Instead she reaches out one gentle hand, hoping to – she doesn’t know. Her mind is filled suddenly with the thought of stroking her thumb along the line of Sarah’s chin, as if that would unmake her. Fix her. Fix this. Fix Delphine. 

Her fingertips are scant centimeters from Sarah’s skin when Sarah takes a step back. Delphine’s hand is left dangling in empty space. They look at each other, for a second; Delphine watches Sarah’s chin go up defensively, thinks any number of names. 

“Yeah,” Sarah says, as if Delphine has said that last part out loud. “That’s what I thought.” She looks at Delphine, eyes dark and unfathomable, and then she turns on her heel and leaves.


	18. Helena & Sarah | Paralian

Helena fidgets the whole car ride to the beach, legs sticking out like bones from beneath the shorts she’s wearing. She doesn’t look quite right in shorts and a tank top, looks too raw to be believed. This isn’t helped by the enormous sun hat she’s wearing and the aviator shades she’d swiped from – shit, Sarah doesn’t even know where. Siobhan, maybe?

“You put on sunscreen, right,” Sarah says, internally rolling her eyes at herself for even asking.

“Yes,  _sestra-_ mother,” Helena says absently, watching the world stream by through the window and her shades, “I will not burn.” 

Sarah nods to herself, short and sharp, focuses back on the road. There’s a slight shuffling sound and then the radio turns up, slow, slow, like Sarah won’t notice if Helena just doesn’t move too fast.

“Are we really doin’ this again,” Sarah says.

“Doing what,” Helena says innocently. “I have never been to the beach, Sarah.”

Sarah’s about eighty percent sure this is a guilt trip.

So she doesn’t object when the radio’s volume grows to what could be labeled as “deafening,” or when Helena does her damnedest to learn the lyrics to “Shake It Off” before the song ends. Because, god: what kind of life has Helena lived, if she hasn’t even been to the beach? 

When she stops the car she’s out of it about five seconds, though. So.

Helena follows her, stumbling over her flip-flops before making an equine snort through her nose and kicking them off. Her bare toes wiggle in the sand.

“It’s so big,” she says quietly. Sarah follows her line of sight to the sea, foaming and spitting and curling over itself over and over again. It really is so big – Sarah doesn’t come here, that often, because she doesn’t like the reminder of how big it actually is. The ocean is something you can’t really run away from once you’ve seen it. That’s not a comfortable thing to face.

She used to bring Kira here every now and then, bundle her into the car and drive for miles and miles and miles to reach the shore. But she hasn’t for years. Sarah folds her arms around herself as an armor against that thought and watches Helena take tentative, bird-like steps through the sand and down to the water. 

Then abruptly she’s  _running_ , shrieking high and excited, arms held above her head like she’s going to hug the ocean. She splashes into the water still screaming, and then immediately trips over herself to leap back out.

“ _Cold!_ ” she yelps accusingly, frowning at Sarah like it’s her fault. Sarah just shrugs, like:  _what did you expect me to do about it_. Anyways, it doesn’t matter; Helena’s leaping back in, in and out and in and out. By the time Sarah’s folded up her pants, made her slow way down to the water, Helena’s waded all the way in up to her thighs and is rocking back and forth, lips sucked between her teeth.

“Wave’s gonna come and you’ll get soaked,” Sarah says mildly. 

“The ocean cannot beat me,” Helena says grandly. “It is just–” she slaps the water’s surface, once, “water.” 

Sarah snorts, and splashes her.

Helena staggers a step backwards, spluttering, looking comically surprised. She shakes her head once, fast like a dog. Blonde curls fly everywhere. She’s beginning to drip.

“Hey, come on,” Sarah says. “Just water.” 

Helena narrows her eyes for one second and then, abruptly, leaps. The world slows. Sarah has enough time to relive all of her choices and regret all of them, and then Helena’s tackled her under the water. There is salt in Sarah’s eyes and nose, and what feels like Helena’s hair in her mouth. Sarah scrabbles, manages to heave off 120 pounds of trained assassin and stagger to her feet. She spits out what’s probably half a bottle of water and heaves for breath.

Helena’s head pops out of the water next to her. She looks at Sarah and makes a  _pssh_ noise through her lips, sending them fluttering; then she laughs, the sound long and malicious and merry.

“You look like panda,  _sestra_ ,” she wheezes. “The ocean won.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> can you believe i wrote fluff


End file.
